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Cherry Whiskey
Mrs. Spence.
Take eight quarts of fine ripe cherries; put them into a jar, then pour over them either six quarts of good whiskey or brandy; let it stand for a month, then take out the fruit, bruise it in a mortar, put it back into the liquor, and let it stand another month; strain off the liquor, and to every quart add three-quarters of a pound of loaf sugar made into a syrup ; pour boiling hot into the cold liquor; let it stand to settle and cool; when quite cold bottle and cork well. Excellent, and improves by keeping.
A steeped cordial rather than anything cooked, so the work is in the waiting. Two things need attention before you start: the scale, which is enormous, and the pits, which the recipe tells you to crush.
- Scale it down hardEight quarts of cherries is roughly 12 to 13 lb of fruit, and six quarts of spirit is seven or eight bottles; the finished cordial runs to something close to two gallons. A tenth of the recipe — about 1 1/4 lb cherries and 2 1/2 cups of whiskey in a 2-quart jar — keeps the same proportions.
- The pits"Bruise it in a mortar" crushes the stones along with the flesh, and cherry stones are cyanogenic: broken kernels release small amounts of hydrogen cyanide into the liquor. Crushed-stone infusions are an old and deliberate tradition, the source of the almond note in kirsch and noyau, but if you would rather not, pit the fruit before the second maceration and bruise the flesh alone. You lose the bitter-almond edge and nothing else.
- Loaf sugar and syrupLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone; plain granulated is the same thing. Three-quarters of a pound per quart of liquor is about 1 2/3 cups, dissolved in the least water that will take it — roughly half a cup per pound — and brought just to a boil.
- Do not pour it boilingHot syrup poured into spirit will drive off some alcohol as vapour, and that vapour is flammable, so keep it away from an open flame or gas burner. Letting the syrup cool to warm or cold before combining avoids the question.
- Which spiritThe "good whiskey" of the period would most often have been rye or bourbon, and probably less aged than what is sold now. Anything at 40 to 50 percent ABV works; below 40 percent the fruit's own water thins the result and it keeps less reliably.
- The jarUse glass or glazed stoneware with a lid that seals but is not clamped tight, and keep it out of the light. Stir or turn it every few days during the first month so the fruit stays submerged — cherries left above the liquor will discolour and oxidise.
- StrainingCoarse strain through a colander first, then through several layers of damp cheesecloth, then leave it to settle for a week and rack the clear liquor off the sediment. Filter paper will clog on the fruit pulp.
- Yield and keepingScaled to a tenth, expect roughly a quart of finished cordial. "Improves by keeping" is accurate: the raw fruit sharpness settles after six months and the colour deepens. Corked and stored cool, it is stable for years.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s from contributions by named housekeepers — Mrs. Spence here — a charitable-subscription format that spread from Chicago to Toronto and made these books a record of what individual women actually kept in their cellars. Cherry cordials of exactly this kind were long known in North America as cherry bounce, a spirit-and-fruit maceration sweetened after the fact rather than fermented; the practice is generally traced to English and Scottish home distilling traditions carried over in the colonial period, and George and Martha Washington's household is often cited as having made a version. The crushed-stone step links it to the European stone-fruit liqueurs — kirsch, noyau, maraschino — where the kernel supplies the bitter-almond note that plain cherry flesh cannot. For a household with a productive cherry tree and no way to keep the crop, a jar of whiskey was as practical a preservation method as a jar of sugar.